ZHANG Zhongjun, an eminent Chinese scientist who died 20 years ago, is being remembered in a book published this week by Shanghai Jiao Tong University to commemorate the 100th year since his birth.

Zhang was renowned for his pioneering work in automation and systems engineering. He was also a celebrated patriot who chose to work in China despite tempting offers from top US universities.

“Professor Zhang was a master in control science in China and one of Jiao Tong University’s treasures,” said Zhang Jie, president of the school. “He cultivated young scientific talent and contributed to China’s modernization. In publishing this book, we want readers to see the richness of his life, the depth of his scientific research and the remarkable contributions he made to this country.”

The book certainly does all that. It includes tributes written by his daughter, professional associates and students.

“It is necessary to publicly commemorate Zhang because the younger generation may forget the valiant work and contributions of many older scientists,” said Xi Yugeng, a former student of Zhang’s and chief editor of the book.

Zhang was born in the city of Jiashan in Zhejiang Province on September 23, 1915. He was so intelligent that he skipped several grades, graduating with top honors from middle school at age 11.

He then came to Shanghai and studied at Nanyang High School before he attended what is now Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1930. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering four years later.

Upon graduation, he enrolled at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, where he was awarded a master’s degree in science in nine months. He went on to earn doctorate in electrical engineering, with a minor in mathematics, in 1938.

Zhang remained at MIT as a postdoctoral associate researcher until the outbreak of World War II. He decided to return to China to be with his family and compatriots.

“My father was the first among his peers who graduated from Jiao Tong University in 1934 and went abroad for studies to return to China,” Zhang Wenyuan, his eldest daughter, wrote in an article included in the book.

Zhang’s intellect was in great demand. Several Chinese universities offered him professorships, and the then US-funded Shanghai Power Co also tried to recruit him.

At age 24, Zhang chose to follow the Nationalist government to Sichuan Province and taught theoretical graduate-level classes in electrical engineering as a professor at Wuhan University, which was relocated to Sichuan during the war.

When the campus’s temporary home was bombed by Japanese forces, Zhang left for the city of Chongqing, where he taught at the National Central University.

When the Japanese army invaded Shanghai in 1937, National Chiao Tung University — as Jiao Tong was known then — was forced to hold classes in scattered safer areas of the city. Its alumni in Chongqing, including Zhang, decided to create a campus branch there. Zhang was appointed dean of its electrical engineering department.

The institute began recruiting postgraduate students in 1943 and taught curricula similar to courses at Harvard and MIT. Zhang taught advanced electrical mathematics, telecommunications and other core courses.

“Some students who were older than him affectionately called him ‘baby professor’,” said Zhang’s daughter, “He was not only a teacher, but also a friend of his students. Their relationships were so close that they played little tricks. One of them damaged my parents’ wedding bed. The school president had to send them a new bed.”

Zhang met his wife in Chongqing, where their first daughter Zhang Wenyuan was born in 1943.

At the end of the war, Zhang returned to the Department of Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as head of the Communications Institute. He published his book Network Analysis in English in 1948. Former Chinese President Jiang Zeming was among his students.

At the end of 1948, Zhang was invited by MIT to return to Massachusetts to become a professor of electrical engineering there. He politely declined the offer.

In the mid-1950s, he published a series of textbooks about electrical power systems and drafted a long-term plan for China’s power grid. He also served as director of the technology office of the Chinese government, where he helped modernize and standardize power generating units in Shanghai.

In the 1960s, Zhang turned to the field of control engineering and founded the Department of Automation at Jiao Tong, becoming its first dean.

Though he was placed under “isolated investigation” between 1967 and 1968 during the “cultural revolution” because his US studies cast him as a suspected spy, he never gave up his studies, his school or his patriotism.

“I was deprived of my job at a shipbuilder, while my brother and sisters lost their education opportunities because of suspicions surrounding my father,” said Zhang Wenyuan. “But my father encouraged us to be optimistic, telling us winter would pass and spring would come soon.”

After the “cultural revolution” ended in 1976, Zhang was 61 but as energetic as ever. He rose at 5am every day and went to bed late to make up, he said, for the time lost in the last 10 years.

“My father always said he would rather die while working,” Zhang Wenyuan said.

Her father became director of the Department of Computer Sciences at Jiao Tong in 1977, where he began research on microcomputers. He also kept a keen on other frontier science around the world, communicating with other eminent researchers.

His dedication, accomplishments and his Theory of Systems Engineering eventually earned him honored membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980.

Zhang finally resigned from all administrative duties at Jiao Tong University in 1985. Rather than move to the US to be reunited with his children living there, he began traveling around China, visiting university campuses and giving lectures on automation and systems engineering.

He contracted a cold in November 1995, while he was giving a lecture series at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was rushed to Shanghai’s Huadong Hospital for treatment, but he still kept tutoring students from his hospital bed. He died on December 29 of pneumonia. “I saw tears in his eyes as he was passing away,” said Zhang Wenyuan. “I know he had wished to live into the 21st century. He told me minutes before he died that he still had so much to do and would get better tomorrow,” Zhang Wenyuan recalled.